Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dinner party in Paris some time ago, an unobtrusive Houston banker named Joe L. (for Lewis) Allbritton listened quietly while a French Cabinet Minister told the story of how a rich Texan had bought a bank in Luxembourg for $5 million, cash in hand. When the Frenchman finished his tale, Allbritton spoke up with a grin: "I heard about that, and I know the fella involved...
Circus tells a tale that could happen only in America. A circus, under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building...
...poems and plays, Lagerkvist, who described himself as "a religious atheist," later developed the starker, more realistic prose style necessary to his vision of humanitarian idealism. In the U.S., he was best known for The Dwarf (1945), a bitter, allegorical novel about human greed, and Barabbas (1951), an enigmatic tale of man's struggle to achieve religious faith...
Never mind that it often seems a parody of Zane Grey. MacLean's tale gleefully highballs along at a brisk, cinematic clip. Funny touches are provided by the English understatements of MacLean's Pinkerton-man hero. He is the sort of chap who, on examining an arrow embedded in the heroine's shoulder, might mutter, "Mmmm, Apache, I shouldn't wonder...
Ultimately, of course, any production succeeds or fails on the strength of its Romeo and its Juliet. Every director must confront a wellnigh insuperable difficulty: Shakespeare presents not just a tale of young love, but of adolescent love. The two lovers are teenagers, and they speak and act as teenagers; the dramatist left no doubt about this. Originally there was no special problem, since Juliet was played by a young boy, and great care was taken in the training of young performers generally...